The smoking section must be sold out
by Rita Zekas, Toronto Star, September 13, 2002
"CAN we go somewhere quiet?" the publicist asked?
Yeah, how about
Pickering?
We settled for a patio table at Bistro 990 so Callum Keith
Rennie could smoke.
Rennie was on his way to the screening of Claire's
Hat, the renamed mockumentary about the making of Picture Claire, the
contentious Bruce McDonald feature in which he co-stars and which is exiled to
video store gulag.
It was McDonald's 1995 rockumentary Hard Core Logo
that catapulted Rennie into mass consciousness. He played rock 'n' roll rebel
Johnny Tallent and blew audiences away. Star Gazing and friend Grant were
equally infatuated with Rennie.
"Do you realize that I am the only person
in this theatre not wearing a black leather jacket?" asked Grant apprehensively,
chafing in his Burberry trench.
Rennie could identify with Tallent. "He's
one foot out the door holding on to his youth. Growing up at 17 when the punk
movement started," Rennie recalled, "it was an aggressive and angry stance that
I reacted to."
He grew up in Edmonton, "bizarre big sky country, where
there are eccentric people trapped by the environment. I `get' them in a
different way than the Birkenstocks in Vancouver and the big city Toronto and
its arrogance and fear."
We could only nod in agreement, distracted by
Rennie's blue eyes, the exact shade of his shirt. Rennie drifted into acting at
age 28.
"I didn't know what an agent was," he chuckled, "although I
believed I was an actor. It's easy to say you're an actor when you're sitting
around smoking cigarettes."
Rennie has been acting for a decade and
divides his time between Vancouver and L.A., where he's working on his golf
swing.
Between strokes, he shot the festival film Flower &
Garnet.
"I don't know how to describe it without sounding cheese ball,"
he demurred. "My character is the heart of `dadness.' It's about loss, a poem
about family and what's beautiful about it. It's about a kid growing up alone;
it's about how a family deals with loss. My character is buried alive with his
(dead) wife and is scratching at the surface. I'm a distant dad.
"I'm
very proud of it."
He's guesting in the series 11th Hour in an episode
directed by David Wellington and would collaborate with McDonald again in a
heartbeat.
"I'd like to shadow Bruce when he works."